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Watt’s ‘Jazz Hands’ Are Bitter Note for Passers

When J. J. Watt was younger and slighter, before fly swatters went from the shelves of Houston hardware stores to the stands at Reliant Stadium, he played high school basketball. It was for a year and a half, and he played well enough to earn a letter at Pewaukee High School, in his small hometown west of Milwaukee. Watt was not good at basketball — he was much better at the shot-put, at which he was the state champion as a senior — but he was already tall and had long arms and immense hands, and that was enough to find a niche.

“In basketball, all I could do was dunk and block shots,” Watt said, the whir of a Jamba Juice blender in the background after a recent practice. “I couldn’t shoot. Just jumping and knocking down balls.”

Watt, 23, a defensive end for the Houston Texans, did not dream of being the tormentor of quarterbacks. He wanted to be the quarterback at Pewaukee High, but he was not the most accurate passer. So instead, he became an excellent tight end, so good that he earned a scholarship to Central Michigan. That role gave him insight into when to look for the ball to come off the quarterback’s hand and how demoralizing it is to an offensive player when the football flies back into his face. Basketball taught him how to time his jumps to meet the ball.

The alchemy that came next, aided by a position switch when he walked on at Wisconsin, gave Watt the ideal foundation from which to launch himself into passing lanes and quarterbacks’ psyches, to become the N.F.L.’s most disruptive enemy of offense. To refine the art of the swat.

There is nobody better at it, now and perhaps ever. According to ProFootballFocus.com, Watt, in his second N.F.L. season after being the 11th overall pick in the 2011 draft, has 10 batted passes through the first half of the season, three short of the unofficial season record by a defensive lineman (the N.F.L. does not keep batted passes as an official statistic) set by Reggie White in 1991. No one else has more than five batted passes this season.

When the Texans face the Chicago Bears on Sunday night, it will serve as a referendum on defensive player of the year honors and a primer in how to dismantle offenses. Watt will dominate the line of scrimmage. And Bears cornerback Charles Tillman, with seven forced fumbles and two interception returns for touchdowns, will troll the backside of Chicago’s defense, if his wife does not go into labor beforehand.

Though the swat has made Watt a star — Swatt Team signs are everywhere in Houston — he considers it a small failure when he bats down a pass. He would rather intercept the ball or sack the quarterback.

“You realize if you’re going to get there, and if not it’s time to put your hands up,” Watt said, adding: “We’re all trying to catch them.”

The genesis of the recent emphasis on the swat is that rushing the passer has become more difficult with the emphasis on the quick passing game, said Trent Dilfer, an ESPN analyst and former N.F.L. quarterback. With so many fast releases and a reliance on bubble and slip screens, pass rushers were foiled, so coaches had to figure out another way to interrupt an offense.

Watt did not develop his swat until he came to Wisconsin, where he landed after one season at Central Michigan and a brief interlude at a junior college. In Madison, the defensive line coach Charlie Partridge first became aware of a relentless work ethic while Watt had to sit out games as a transfer. Watt treated Tuesday and Wednesday practices as his game days, going against the starting offensive line. Then each night, he would watch film of himself on the scout team, a rarity among players in his role, Partridge said.

When Watt watches film now, it is not with the intent of figuring out how to swat a quarterback’s passes, but to see how to beat the man who will try to block him. During games, he gets the feel of the quarterback’s timing and where he will try to throw. Much of what Watt does is instinct, but it is instinct shaped by what Partridge and now the Texans’ defensive line coach, Bill Kollar, have taught him.

Partridge moved Watt around on the defensive line so he would get used to handling different kinds of blocks and shifting his eyes to the quarterback, where they are fixed throughout the play. Partridge also reminded Watt to get his hands up as he rushed. The closer a rusher gets to the quarterback, the more the angles are cut off and the better the chance for a deflection.

“We would laugh at J. J.; we call them jazz hands,” Partridge said. “When you’re going into a guy like that and you don’t jump, you make all the jazz hand. You just keep running toward them, put your hands up, you’re running like a nut job with your hands waving.”

Photo

Charlie Partridge, the defensive line coach at Wisconsin, urged Watt to rush the quarterback with his hands up.Credit
Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency

Watt jumps — his vertical leap is 37 inches — when the quarterback cocks his arm, but Partridge gave him a critical key to timing it. He told him to watch the quarterback’s front — or off — hand. If that hand comes off the ball, Partridge said, it decreases the chances of a pump fake. Most quarterbacks cannot fake with only one hand without dropping the ball — Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger is an exception — and Watt is currently irritated that the Texans’ backup quarterback T. J. Yates, a friend, has recently begun pump faking with the scout team in practice, increasing the degree of difficulty.

Most coaches do not want their defensive linemen to knock down passes in practice, Kollar said, because they want the secondary to get the work. But Texans Coach Gary Kubiak has told Kollar to do whatever he has to do to get his players ready. At Wisconsin, Partridge would put Watt on different kinds of blocks and then have someone throw dozens of passes at different angles. Partridge was trying to train Watt to leap with the intent of locating the ball with his hands, to his right or left.

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Watt sometimes takes a step back so a lineman cannot grab him before he leaps, or grab his jersey or hit him in the stomach. He guesses he jumps on almost every play, and probably touches the ball 20 percent of the time.

For all of his giddy celebration when he bats a pass down — he wags his finger; he has been caught saying quarterbacks should not try to throw on him — Watt said no pass was easy to bat down. He did not get a deflection off Peyton Manning or Ryan Fitzpatrick, who is especially good at getting rid of the ball quickly, though he did have 5 of the Texans’ 10 hits on him.

Dilfer says he expects that teams will try to adjust to Watt’s rare skill and size — his hands, from thumb to pinkie, measure 11 ½ inches, and at 6 feet 5 inches, he has a wingspan of 82 ½ inches — by building more pump fakes into their throws. Most of Watt’s blocks come between the numbers on the field, so teams will very likely throw more often to the perimeter. And, Dilfer says, quarterbacks will have to attempt deeper throws, because the ball is launched at a higher trajectory. If he were playing, he said, he would take a three-step drop, pump fake to his left and then reset and launch his pass.

Nothing is guaranteed, though. At 6-6, Baltimore quarterback Joe Flacco would have seemed to have a built-in advantage. Watt batted down two of his passes.

It is nearly inevitable that Watt will break White’s unofficial record, but he wants to be known as a complete player, and so far, he has been one, leading the league with 10 ½ sacks and all defensive linemen with 39 tackles.

Still, he has become something of a cult phenomenon, referred to as J. J. Swatt for a reason.

“The guy has great hands,” Kollar said. “If he wasn’t playing defensive line, he would be a heck of a tight end.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 11, 2012, on Page SP4 of the New York edition with the headline: Watt’s ‘Jazz Hands’ Are Bitter Note for Passers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe